Rebecca Brady, founder of Top Seedz, employs about 30 people in her small factory. One of them is ... [+]
Rosa Kumba arrived in Buffalo, New York, in 2013, from a refugee camp in Congo. That was, coincidentally, the same year that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would steer $1 billion to the long-suffering city to revive its Rust Belt misfortunes. Buffalo, once a national center of shipping, manufacturing and finance, had gradually become something of a national joke, known mostly for its bad winters and sports culture.
“I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, “I thought you were just beer and wings,” says Rebecca Brady, the founder of Top Seedz, the healthy-cracker company that employs Kumba – and is now expanding to a new manufacturing locating in Buffalo.
“But Buffalo has been really, really good to me.”
Brady and Kumba talked with me as I was on a recent visit to the city as part of a book tour. I ot interested in what was happening in Buffalo, which was once one of the largest U.S. cities and a world-leading grain port, after I visited Syracuse. (Disclosure: 43North, a state-funded agency promoting technology and economic development in Buffalo, was a sponsor of a panel during my visit).
A Northern Rebirth
A lot has happened since 2013. For one thing, Kumba, Brady and thousands of other people are part of a little-noticed, still fragile economic comeback in Buffalo, which has gone from being the butt of jokes to having a quiet buzz in entrepreneurship circles. Buffalo’s is a potential renaissance in two parts: immigrants are restoring some of the population lost to seven decades of decline. And, at the same time, the state’s money is helping to drive a new tech community.
For another thing that has changed since 2013, the question of what happens to places like Buffalo now seems of pressing national importance, a test of whether capitalism and democracy can deliver equitable and free lives for most of its people.
All over the country, there are new shoots of economic growth in places I’ve visited, from Kansas City to Louisville. These are cities that were being left behind and are now somehow finding ways to come back – but their progress is by no means uncertain.
Mike Wisler, the chief information officer at Buffalo-headquartered M&T Bank, is part of the Buffalo renaissance. He was recruited from Capital One by M&T CEO Rene Jones. His mandate is to hire 1,000 techies. He’s halfway there.
Even before he came, Wisler had been thinking about a change for a while. His travels in the world of technology and innovation kept taking him to the same six places: San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Toronto, New York and McLean, Va. Meanwhile, he visited siblings in Alabama and Michigan, who lacked the same opportunities he say in those centers of power.
“I had this voice in my head, and the voice was saying, ‘This isn’t going to work if you can only go to six places.’”
What he meant by the word, “this,” is the United States of America.
Who Lives In The East Side
The comeback in Buffalo is just beginning, and the big risk it runs is that it will leave the city’s Black population behind. After my panel discussion in downtown Buffalo, I went on a tour of the city with Keiah Shauku, who runs a University of Buffalo grant program for founders.
She showed me the signs of work being done – a theater being rehabbed, a Black-owned ice cream shop called Mr. Kones, and a maker’s space called The Foundry.
But deeper into the neighborhood, we found the Tops grocery store where 10 Black people were murdered and three injured by a white supremacist mass shooter last spring. The store has re-opened.
In the days after the shooting, Buffalo residents, many of them white, rushed to the neighborhood to hand out food. News reports had called the area a “food desert” because the Tops store is the only grocery on the historically Black east side. The rush to help was sincere – but it was short-term and the word desert implies a naturally occurring phenomenon, not decades of systemic racism and individual and corporate decisions not to invest in Black enterprise.
“So, people from outside of the community relied on a phrase that was likely coined far from the community, in some ivory tower somewhere or on some TED stage, to tell them how to see that space and to determine what help those people really needed,” she told me later by email, expanding on a conversation we had in the car. “No one bothered to listen to the community or let them decide the help that they needed. Instead, boxes of food were handed out that would soon be marked up and on the same corner store shelves that purportedly made the community a food desert.”
She’s a native Buffalonian, and a part of the comeback, too, even if she has a close view of some of its imperfections.
Stemming from its history as a large shipping hub, Buffalo has a wealth of real estate assets — ... [+]
The Nation’s Leading Grain Port
Buffalo’s promise is most obvious along the shore of Lake Erie, where old grain silos and industrial buildings have turned into condos, and where I found a bustling seafood restaurant on a Thursday night. There, you can get a sense of the importance of the old Buffalo, which started booming when the Erie Canal opened in 1825.
Slip back in time to 1901 to the Pan-American Exposition, held in Buffalo, when the city was the nation’s leading grain port, sending Midwestern grain to Europe and beyond. Two presidents, Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland, had came from Buffalo. William McKinley, visiting the Expo, was assassinated there. At that time, Buffalo was also a center of the civil rights movement. To counter “Old Plantation” and “Darkest Africa” exhibits – you can imagine the racist content — at the Expo, W.E.B. Dubois and others organized a Negro Exhibit that featured portraits and literary works by Black people. The Niagra Movement, the precursor to the NAACP, was launched from Buffalo.
The city maintained its stature through the middle of the 20th century; its population peaked at a half-million in 1950. But other seaways were built, and then, as American manufacturing declined, Buffalo lost Bethlehem Steel and 100,000 people in the 1970s. Buffalo was losing people as fast as water over the nearby Niagra Falls, shrinking by more than 50% between the early part of the 20th century and the end.
In 2007, a Harvard professor basically advocated that the government should let Buffalo die.
A Small Wave of Immigration
Buffalo didn’t get the message. As in other second and third-tier cities across the country, Buffalo’s nonprofit community borrowed a page from the big-city book, and started welcoming immigrants from around the world. In the 2020 Census, Buffalo grew by .6%, or about 17,000 people, to 278,000, with all of the growth coming from immigrants. On the East Side of Buffalo, the historically Black neighborhood, new immigrants are starting restaurants and markets – and importantly, they are filling jobs.
They are people like Kumba who are moving into decaying housing stock and sending their children to college. Her husband, a journalist, had been targeted by a faction in the war in Angola; they are a from a territory called Cabinda. Kumba didn’t even know where she, her husband, and five of her six children were headed when they boarded a plane for Belgium. That’s the kind of profile that convinces the U.S. government to offer a family asylum.
But her oldest son, an adult, is still in Africa; her first sentence during our interview was to ask if I could help get him out.
Eventually, they landed in Buffalo, where an agency called Journey’s End helped them find a place to live, schools and jobs. Kuma’s husband began delivering books. She started working for a laundry. But when it was acquired by a larger company, the new owner cut employees’ pay.
That didn’t sit well with Kumba. “You work for a long time and your pay goes down?” she asked pointedly. By 2020, she was looking for something better.
The Tech Community
While the immigrants are moving into the East Side, the tech community is taking root downtown and along the Main Street. Andrew Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion dollars eventually turned into $1.5 billion. Some of the promises haven’t completely paid off. For instance, a solar manufacturer became a Tesla plant, employing only about a quarter of the hoped-for workforce.
But in 2014, the state money helped launch 43North, an accelerator that has invested $35 million in 59 companies. It follows a typical incubator model, and has rapidly, because of the size and number of its prizes (up to $1 million), become one of the most prominent in the country, drawing the likes of Gary Vaynerchuck to its fall competition.
People often over emphasize the role of a high-tech industry in broad economic development. Venture-backed tech investment creates some jobs. It creates more wealth, which in turn often flows to the already wealthy.
But 43North, as a nonprofit, may avoid that conundrum. It occupies a few floors in the tallest skyscraper in Buffalo, bought for a million-dollar song by a Washington, D.C. developer Douglas Jemal in 2016. Jemal now owns a hotel, and a handful of other properties – and he’s developing a $100 million apartment complex, according to The Buffalo News. Along with cash, the accelerator gives free space to prize-winning companies (I met the CEOs of Infuiss, which recruits test subjects in Africa for pharmaceutical companies, and KangarooTime, a platform for child-care companies).
43North wouldn’t reveal its IRR, but it says it has created more than 1,000 jobs in the Western New York region, nearly 3,000 globally, and has a portfolio valuation of over $4 billion.
One of its investee companies, ACV Auctions, built on Buffalo’s car manufacturing history with the creation of a platform for car dealers’ auctions. It went public at a $4.9 billion valuation in 2021. The profits from investments go into the 43North Foundation, set up to benefit Buffalo.
Most of the competing companies are technology based. But a few have been old-school companies, modern day versions of the ones that grew up in Buffalo a hundred years ago.
Top Seedz
And that brings us to Rebecca Brady. A native of New Zealand, she moved to Buffalo in 2015 when her husband was transferred. She had taken a decade out of the workforce to rear their three children.
The 10-year gap in her resume meant it would be hard to find a job. So, she did the next best thing in 2017: She started a company to manufacture her homemade crackers, which were a consistent hit whenever she brought them to parties. Made of pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, flax seeds and arrowroot, they are much healthier than the average wheat cracker.
She started off by going to the Small Business Development Center at Buffalo State University, which gave her some basics of how to launch a food business. Investing $5,000 of her own money,
she rented space in a shared kitchen and started selling in farmer’s markets. This year, only four years later, she is aiming for $4.5 million in revenue.
When it was time for her to hire employees, she happened to be speaking to a friend who volunteered at Journey’s End, the refugee aid agency in Buffalo that had helped Kumba.
The African woman joined Top Seedz in September 2020, learning to roll out the crackers from Brady. Kuba is working to pay for her children’s education. “I’m fighting for my children,” she says. She wants all of them to go to college, and the third, who has the ambition to become a doctor, to go to medical school. With five languages already, she is working on English.
“I love my state,” she says, meaning New York.
Paying $16-20 an hour, Brady now employs about 30 people, many of them refugees. Their home countries dot a map in the factory’s anteroom and include Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.
Being in Buffalo, she heard about the 43 North competition. Coming out of the pandemic, it was a good year to be a company with a business model that builds jobs and community. She never expected to win, but thought the exposure to mentors would be worthwhile.
On the stage at Shea’s Theater, “I’d actually stopped listening,” she remembered, and was caught off guard when Top Seedz won the grand prize. “I think they liked it that I was profitable from the beginning,” Brady said.
She is using the million dollars to expand into a larger factory space, 35,000 square feet, on her journey to become an international brand – she has to get to New Zealand, or her mother will kill her, she says.
As a business owner, she reminds herself of something she used to tell the children she coached on swim teams: Don’t waste energy looking at what your competitors are doing, or looking over your shoulder at the past. Keep your eyes on the goal ahead, and stay focused on what you want to be.
Self-awareness is the biggest advantage of all.
Maybe that holds true for Buffalo, too.
“Buffalo is a gritty city,” Keiah Shauku wrote me in her follow-up email. “This city comprises the sons and daughters of people who crossed oceans, rivers, and vales to get here—just to work in some of the toughest working environments. What they lost in their journey they built with their own hands here.
The day that Buffalonians understand the truth of their grit—both for themselves and of their neighbors, is the day that this sleeping giant will awaken.”
